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The amazing comic art GIFs of ABVH

We do love a good GIF here at Robot 6. I could make all sorts of bold claims for the format, like it’s one of the first great digital native art forms. I could quote the nerds at the Oxford American Dictionaries who, after making it their 2012 word of the year, announced “the GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace.” Or I could just point you to the Tumblr blog of the pseudonymous GIF creator ABVH, clearly someone who loves comics.

In the last few weeks he’s posted animated versions of images by Kevin O’Neill and Yale Stewart, but the clear winner is this unsettling adaptation of Jock’s instant-classic cover to Detective Comics #880.

I’m looking at that and thinking about the hours of work he’s put into creating it: it must have been exacting, exhausting, a real labor of love.

Webcomic creator Yale Stewart is another Robot 6 favorite, due to his charming webcomic JL8. Here ABVH takes Stewart’s composition and imbues it with even more character, if possible.

And here’s one of two Kev O’Neill League of Extraordinary Gentlemen covers that ABVH has posted in the last month. I love this, I’ve been humming the overture from Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds all day since seeing it. All together now! “The chances of anything coming from Mars, were a million to one they said. BUT STILL THEY COME!”